


heads, tails

by Siria



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Episode Related, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-22
Updated: 2009-09-22
Packaged: 2017-10-02 20:44:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the first week after they kicked him out, John slept in his car.</p>
            </blockquote>





	heads, tails

**Author's Note:**

> Set pre episode 5.19, 'Vegas.' Written for the very generous [Esteefee](http://esteefee.livejournal.com). Thanks to [Cate](http://sheafrotherdon.livejournal.com) for beta reading.

For the first week after they kicked him out, John slept in his car. A beat-up Chevy Camaro wasn't the most comfortable of places to sleep, not when you were over six foot and the wrong side of thirty—there were mornings John woke up and it was hard to decide which he should rub away first: the sleep from his eyes or the crick from his neck. The lady behind the counter at Starbucks raised an eyebrow at him every time he came in to get a dark roast, yawning and squint-eyed at six in the morning, but turned a blind eye to how he would go take a bird bath in the restroom while his coffee was brewing. Wasn't like he had anywhere else to go; in an Air Force town like this one, few landlords would take a chance on him and even fewer people would give him a job.

The morning of his seventh day of being homeless, jobless and officially disgraced, John sat on the hood of his car—scalding-hot cup of coffee in his hand, looking up at the distant blue where some jets from the base were flying manoeuvres—and made an inventory of his life so far. He had his car and a couple changes of clothes in a duffle bag in the back seat; three Johnny Cash LPs in the trunk and nothing to play them on; a little over fifteen grand in the bank, the remnants of his combat pay and what little money his dad had left him; a handful of now-useless job skills, a trick knee that ached when the weather turned cold, and a road map of the American Southwest.

He slid back behind the wheel, picked up the map, and let it fall open at a random page. Las Vegas, Nevada—a sprawl of buildings in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by empty sky and clean sand. John thought for a moment, then shrugged. He could live with that. Tossing the atlas onto the passenger seat next to him, he turned on the engine and headed for the highway. "Go west, young man," he told himself, and smirked like he'd said something funny.

 

* * *

 

John wasn't in any hurry to get to Nevada—it wasn't like there was anything waiting for him, just a place to stop—but somewhere past the middle of Kansas he put his foot on the gas and let the car go. It wasn't much like flying—the horizon was too close for that, the land that stretched away flat on either side of him only hinting at how the Earth curved away from you when you saw it from up high—but hearing the engine hum as he shifted gears, driving with the windows wound down so that the wind tangled his hair, was enough like freedom that it made something ease in his chest. Didn't hurt that he was heading west, either; didn't hurt that he was pushing to leave it all behind.

He spent the night in a Super 8 in WaKeeney, Kansas. Sleep was hard to come by, the white plaster of the ceiling not the most interesting thing he'd ever looked at, and at four in the morning he found himself staring bleary-eyed at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. For a moment, he had an inexplicable urge to punch the glass—the same kind of dumb-as-shit move that left him with twelve dead and suffering through three months of rehab on his knee in Landstuhl—so John shaved off the four days' growth of beard from his cheeks instead.

There was a certain kind of irony to the fact that he ended up bleeding about the same amount from that as he would have if he'd just smashed the goddamn mirror. He carefully stuck pieces of toilet paper onto the nicks and scrapes, and it took him longer than it should to realise that his hands were shaking. He probably looked like six different kinds of hell, but the woman serving the breakfast buffet still gave him a big, toothy grin when he staggered in for a cup of coffee and carefully ignored the fact that he took enough pastries with him to keep him going well into the afternoon from the sugar content alone.

John was heading through the lobby out to his car when he saw the pay-phone; and he didn't know where the impulse came from, but he set down his duffle bag and his little sack of food and stuck a few quarters into it, juggling his steaming styrofoam cup of coffee from hand to hand while he waited for the call to go through.

"Sheppard Utilities," said a voice on the other end of the line, way too perky for how early it still was, even in Washington. "How may I direct your call?"

"Dave... uh, David Sheppard, please." John resisted the urge to clear his throat.

"I'm afraid Mr Sheppard isn't available right now," the voice said smoothly, and yeah, John should have realised that it wouldn't be as easy to reach Dave as it had been to reach their father—no one at the company knew him any more for one thing, and for another, Dave would be pointedly trying not to run things the way Dad had, scrabbling the company back from the brink of bankruptcy. _Forging a brand-new corporate culture_—at least that's what the glossy shareholders' reports said when John got them once a year, despite the fact that John didn't own any stock in the company anymore—and when the voice on the other end of the line asked, "Would you like to leave a message, sir, or would you like to be connected to our customer care line?" John said, "Nah, no, that's—no," and hung up.

 

* * *

 

The thing was, you looked at Afghanistan from the sky, and it was fucking beautiful. All around Herat, the landscape was arid and stark, pushed upwards by long-dead volcanoes into a geometry of sun-bleached peaks and shadowed valleys, and there had been something about looking down from the cockpit at a countryside so seemingly unwelcoming and knowing that people could call it _home_ that had thrilled John every time. In Afghanistan, the horizon was a clear, sharp line at which to aim yourself, and sometimes John dreamed he was back there still, dreamed that he'd never left—that he'd always be there, floating free, pushing towards the bright blue edge of things with his breath coming hard in his chest and his hands sure and light on the controls, people living and dying and fighting for home far below him, always just out of reach.

 

* * *

 

John got into Vegas just past noon, Tuesday. He pulled into a parking lot after six hours on the road and had to heave himself out of the Camaro so he could stretch his legs. His bad knee clicked and protested, and the ache in the ligaments was just bad enough to make him limp down the street to the nearest bar. Inside, it was dim enough to make him remove his glasses and cool enough to make him wish he was wearing more than a threadbare old t-shirt; the bar smelled like stale alcohol and old cigarette smoke, and the cold beer he was served was just good enough to make him order a burger and fries. They were hot and greasy and salty, and John had eaten most of them by the time he realised he was maybe freaking out just a little bit about the fact that he'd upped and moved to Vegas on a whim.

"Well, shit," he mumbled to himself, and ordered another beer. If he was going to freak out, might as well do it with alcohol in his system and some college football on the TV.

"You need help?" the bartender asked him when it was just shy of midnight and John's freak out had been safely diluted by his blood alcohol level.

"Nah," John said, "'m okay," and he could still walk, which was just about the same thing.

On his way back to another night spent in the back of his car, John stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans, tilted his head back and looked up at the sky. He had to admit, Vegas had this going for it: the lights that blazed out from the Strip, neon and sodium bright, leached the colour from the night-time sky—he couldn't see the stars.

 

* * *

 

He'd prayed. When he'd thought it was the end, he'd prayed and he'd meant it and he's still not quite sure what to make of that—what he's supposed to do with faith.

They'd made it back almost all the way to the air base at Herat, coming in low over the mountains with five people crammed into the back of the chopper and his commanding officer yelling at him over the radio, promising retribution and court martial and the insertion of his boot an improbable distance into Major Sheppard's ass. John had just gritted his teeth and refrained from answering, pushing every last bit of speed he could out of the engines because he knew that Hulme was bleeding out just a couple feet away from him; he could be as much of a jackass to the colonel later as he wanted, but he had to get them all back first.

The investigation later established that there had probably been insurgents hidden somewhere high up in the hills. One of them got off a lucky shot, some kind of small arms fire that took out the chopper's tail rotor—John knew all of this because he'd had to sit there in his too-tight dress blues in a too-hot room, hands clasped white-knuckled on the table in front of him while the mechanic had droned on about structural capabilities.

He hadn't known about any of that. This was what John remembered: the sudden shudder and jump of the chopper around him; talking to it low and fast as he fought to stop it from spiralling; the way his breath caught for the moment when he thought he'd done it, he'd done it; the free fall to the village low down on the mountainside below; the still-spinning blades catching and dragging against the rock, slowing the helicopter until it hit almost gently up against the wall of a house. He remembered the silence that had existed in the moment between when it was all over and the time the screams started—and in that long moment it felt like he'd remembered all the prayers his mom had ever taught him, her fingers deft and sure as they moved over her rosary beads. He'd prayed until the combat engineers arrived to cut him out, and then in a display of good judgement that makes him smirk even still, he'd passed out just before they'd pulled him free.

John still wasn't quite sure of the quality of his own faith. It was a battered thing, threadbare and worn; ask him any given day and he didn't think he would be able to tell you what it was. Sunday mornings are more likely to see him wandering between card tables in a downtown casino than they are to see him at Mass. But he wears a cross on a chain around his neck, tries not to do worse than he can help, and every now and then there are days where he'll genuflect and slide into a pew at the back of the little church a couple blocks away from his place, where all the services are in Spanish and hundreds of candles gutter and flame around statues of the saints, interceding for people like him—days when he'll pray and mean it.

 

* * *

 

The bar didn't quite become his regular hangout, but it was close enough to make no real difference—the people who could usually be found propping up either side of the bar didn't care enough to want to know his name, but watching the game there was easier than getting cable in the efficiency apartment he'd found. Cheaper too; not that money was that tight yet, but his bank balance was steadily dwindling each time he checked it, always just a little faster than he could supplement it with what he earned working a couple of odd jobs here and there or winning fifty bucks in a back room poker game.

There were things he could have done—people he could have called—and even with the black mark on his resume, he was good with his hands and had an engineering degree. But there was something that kept him in Vegas for three full months without looking for more—playing cards a little too much, taking his coffee with a little too much Irish in it, picking up people he probably shouldn't have—the odd kind of anonymity you could find in transient crowds, or that big sky overhead that never showed him the stars. John tried not to think about it that often; the crazy thing was that losing yourself in the angles and corners of your own body helped you to push aside the memories of other angles, other bodies.

He grew used to the seeming-stable little life he'd built for himself here in Vegas—he had the bar to go to for cheap beer; had a grocery store he went to whenever he needed to stock up on Count Chocula, even if he hardly ever had milk in his crappy little fridge; acquired a new soundtrack for his days: the Stones, Johnny Cash, Creedence, Willie Nelson, Led Zeppelin. John knew enough to be aware that he was kind of the cliché of single guy in his thirties; he also knew enough not to give a crap.

 

* * *

 

It was probably fairer to say that Pete ran into John than the other way around. John was sitting at the bar, groaning to himself while he watched Boston College get their asses collectively handed to them, when someone clapped him on the shoulder and said, "Hey, _Shep_? John Sheppard?" and John looked up at a face he hadn't seen in over a decade—Pete Rasmussen; officer training; more eager than able and a half-way point drop-out. Pete'd always given John the vague impression of being an overly friendly Labrador puppy, and so he forced a smile, said, "Hey," and somehow found himself sitting in a booth with Pete and his buddies, knocking back his fifth beer.

Turned out they were cops in the Las Vegas Police Department, and if they their laughs were maybe just a little too loud, if they were all too quick to call him _Shep_ and invite him over to next month's poker game, they were still good guys—more comfortable talking sports and car engines than asking how John had ended up in Vegas or what he was doing right now, and that was just fine with John. He hadn't really hung out with anyone since he'd got to Vegas—hadn't really hung out with anyone since that last leave day he'd spent knocking back a quart of shitty vodka and squinting at a grainy VHS porn tape with Mitch and Dex and the others—and he'd maybe lost the knack of it a little.

That might have explained why, when Pete turned to look at him with beer-bleary eyes and asked him if he was doing anything right now, John said, "Nothing much. Out of the Force."

"Should join up with us, man," Pete said, "You'd be a good fit!"

"Nah," John said, voice maybe a little more clipped than he'd intended it to be.

Pete didn't seem to notice. "Hey, think about it. We've got a shortage right now, and you've got all the, you know, skills and stuff. Give me a call, Shep, and you'll be in—I'll put in a word for you."

"Eh," John said, "I'll think about it."

And the thing was he usually meant the exact goddamn opposite when he said that, and there was nothing he wanted less than to end up a cop—but over the next few days, he found himself thinking about it. He wasn't quite sure why, not when the thought of trying so hard again made his heart beat faster, made his breath hiccup in his chest; but he found himself calling Pete; found himself asking for information and scribbling it down on a pad of paper. Maybe twenty-six weeks training with a group of kids wouldn't be so bad.

 

* * *

 

His mom used to keep a little leather-bound prayer-book on the table beside her bed, on top of the family bible and whatever trashy paperback was her current Saturday-morning read. She read from it daily before getting out of bed—one of John's earliest memories was of her leaning against her pillows, the long, sleek braid of her hair falling over her shoulder while she read with careful concentration about the life of the saint of the day. There were little pieces of paper stuck haphazardly throughout to mark her favourites—when he was a kid, John hadn't got the irony of her devotion to the martyrs.

October 28th was a particular favourite. "Saint Jude, Johnny," she'd tell him, showing him the black-and-white drawing of a tall man, gaunt, with a head like a brown speckled egg and a straggling beard. Jude was looking away from them. "The patron saint of hopeless cases and things almost despaired of. He's always been very good to me."

Then she sent him downstairs to get more ice for the glass that also seemed to live on her bedside table. John hadn't thought to send up a prayer to Jude at the time; but maybe, just maybe, Jude had been looking out for him ever since.

 

* * *

 

They gave him a gun and a badge and a uniform and expected him to do some good with it. John didn't know if he'd be able, but he could try, at least. Vegas was some place he loved now, in a way; the desert sun almost hot enough to drive the ache from his bones; the sky big enough to admit all sorts of possibilities.


End file.
